Female ad tech CEO explains why there are so few women tech entrepreneurs: Women take less risks than men

Ad tech company Drawbridge's CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan is
remarkable in a number of ways.

This year, Drawbridge — which aims to create an anonymized ID to
help marketers identify their customers across devices — has
become the fastest-growing female-led company in America,
according to the
Inc. 5000.

Women in leadership roles are rare and even rarer in ad tech. Ad
tech company Maxifier identified women account for just 2.9% of ad tech
CEOs.

And Sivaramakrishnan's achievements are rarer still: As a former
planetary scientist, one of the instruments she helped design
during her PhD is currently on the NASA New Horizons spacecraft
mission to Pluto.

Why so few women are ad tech leaders — the lack of females in
STEM subjects and the aggressively competitive nature of the ad
tech industry

Sivaramakrishnan is the first to admit that her career path has
been unusual. Coming from a discipline of applied mathematics
research, she had no expertise in advertising or marketing when
she graduated from Stanford University and joined mobile
advertising company AdMob in 2007 as the only woman in the
engineering department. AdMob was acquired by Google in 2009,
where Sivaramakrishnan worked as a member of technical staff
for under a year before founding Drawbridge in 2010.

Sivaramakrishnan told Business Insider it became apparent early
on, no matter which route she took, that she would be one of the
few women in her field. Only around 10% of the women taking her
engineering and statistics courses at university were women and
that number diminished rapidly as she looked at other technology
entrepreneurs. Within ad tech, Sivaramakrishnan says there
are women in leadership roles, but most of those are in marketing
and sales positions.

There are a few reasons why Sivaramakrishnan thinks this is the
case.

She describes the ad tech industry as an "aggressively
competitive environment." That attracts certain personality
types.

"If you're fiercely competitive and you're male, you tend to
attract people of a similar kind, and that can skew the
stats," Sivaramakrishnan said.

There's also a long-running trend of women not chasing STEM
(science, technology, engineering, and math) qualifications —
something a number of companies and governments are trying to
address. One isn't just limited to ad tech, but entrepreneurship
in general: "The risk profile is distinct between the way men and
women view risk, especially with respect to a work/life balance.
It propels [women] towards less risk, especially when large
companies offer you less risky opportunities, a steady stream of
income, a certainty about what the next month will look like."

How Sivaramakrishnan uses being one of the few women in her field
to her advantage

Stanford
University's campus is seen from atop Hoover Tower in Stanford,
California.Thomson
Reuters

Sivaramakrishnan said one of the best lessons she learned came
early on: "One of my professors at Stanford said: 'Remember, as
one of the few people of your type — women engineers — you stand
out. You stand out when you do well and you stand out when you
underperform because there’s so few of you. People remember you
even if you mess up. And that’s stuck with me for the last 10
years."

As a result, every time Sivaramakrishnan goes to present on
stage, or sits on a conference panel, or enters into a
partnership discussion, she is always conscious to put her best
foot forward and be very prepared as she is acting as the biggest
brand ambassador for the company.

She says she has only sat on two or three panel sessions in
her career where there were other women — and even then they
were not technologists. But she said that's not just what has set
her apart — it's her approach to the panels that come from a
perspective of technology, mathematics, and data, rather than
personal bias.

Kamakshi
Sivaramakrishnan.Courtesy of
Drawbridge

Not mentioning any names or specific experiences, she said: "I do
experience what you might call personalities, and egos —
misplaced or otherwise. Strong communicators. Heated debates.
I've been on panels where you notice the person is trying to wing
it. These are the flavors of the realities I experience. I
personally ... do not shy away from a strong debate as long as it
is objective in nature and rooted in logic and data. What I try
to deflect is a misplaced sense of ego, or a sense of a
personality just for the sake of having one."

We asked whether this approach, plus Sivaramakrishnan's
gender, can sometimes work as an advantage.

Sivaramakrishnan responded by telling a story of a meeting she
had with a big UK agency earlier that day. At the end of the
meeting one of the male executives asked: "Can I ask you a
question outside the scope of this discussion? There are few
women who lead companies and have backgrounds like yours. Can you
tell me what it feels like?"

Sivaramakrishnan said: "I was like 'wow'. He vocalized something
that other people had been thinking of, that they want to ask,
but some don't ... as I left, the group said I was an inspiration
to them. I knew I did not just do right by the partnership but I
felt good that I had inspired some of the women in the room. And
the person asking me the question was a man."

Sivaramakrishnan's advice for other women in tech: "Do your
research"

We asked whether Sivaramakrishnan would advise other women to go
into ad tech. She explained that while one of the applications of
Drawbridge is ad tech, she considers it more of a pure technology
company. And instead, she would encourage women to become
technologists.

"I think women bring perspective, calmness, and balanced
aggression in a positive way. If you're good at what you do as an
engineer or a mathematician and you also have that natural
bi-product of being a woman to supplement your work [you're
likely to go a long way,]" she said.

Sivaramakrishnan also shared advice for those other entrepreneurs
and technologists who find themselves as the only woman on the
panel, or the only woman in a meeting. She said she has always
stood out — in a good way — when she comes to the conversation
from a perspective of data, mathematics, and logic.